Anti-national Education, Or, The Spirit of Sectarianism Morally Tested by Means of Certain Speeches and Letters from the Member for Kilmarnock: With an Appendix

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Adam & Charles Black ... and Longman & Company, London, 1837 - 50 pages

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Page 21 - Once, to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.
Page 36 - In those schools every lesson, however secular, arises out of, and comes back to the Bible : for example, if the lesson should be the natural history of the bear, it will not be permitted to be entered into till the passage...
Page 21 - Creator no error is harmless) that the Bible is given to teach all knowledge, scientific included, and that nothing can be true which is not to be found there. The question in such schools always is, what does the Bible say upon this point? and the error is inculcated that God has opened only one, and not two great books, the book of Nature as well as the book of Revelation, and has not made the one to throw light upon the other, provided they are separately studied.
Page 36 - ... that tore the children that mocked Elijah; and if the lesson should peradventure turn to the goat, the description of the day of judgment, with the goats upon the left hand and the sheep upon the right, is first found out and read. This leads to the inculcation of the hurtful error (for I hold that by the arrangements of the Creator no error is harmless) that the Bible is given to teach all knowledge, scientific included, and that nothing can be true which is not to be found there. The question...
Page 46 - Association. chiefly indebted for the preceding hasty outline, ' are generally a collection of pieces in prose and verse, termed Scott's Lessons, or Beauties, or the School Master's Collection ; selections not made on a principle of conveying useful information in a simple manner, but as exercises in elocution, and containing passages from our poets and orators, of which most young persons can neither perceive the truth, nor feel the beauty. To this is added a Spelling Book, an Elementary Grammar,...
Page 21 - God has opened only one, and not two great books—the book of nature as well as the book of revelation, and has not made one to throw light upon the other, provided they are separately studied. The effect of this upon secular knowledge is such as to unfit young people so trained for after-life; the mind is weakened and injured by it, and it will be practically found that the children coming from such schools will be exceedingly imperfectly educated, if they can be said to be educated at all. In...
Page 36 - Wherefore our decision is this ; that those precepts which learned men have committed to writing, transcribing them from the common reason and common feelings of human nature, are to be accounted as not less divine, than those contained in the tables given to Moses ; and that it could not be the intention of our Maker to supersede, by a law graven upon stone, that which is written with his own finger on the table of the heart.
Page 22 - ... so as to subject the young person to the influences of fanaticism, and (if there is a free disposition) to religious insanity. But, in the great majority of cases, it will operate in the way of disgust, by over doing religious instruction, and the Bible and the reiterated instructions will be all thrown away whenever the pupil escapes into freedom. It is in this way I hold, secondly, that religion is injured by this mode of education, and the end is defeated, for over-doing is always attended...
Page 45 - The department, then, of the teacher of religion, under a wiser system of education, is obvious, and it is the highest as well as the holiest behest of mortal man.
Page 36 - Have you any examples in support of your statement ? — I know schools, with well-meaning but imperfectly educated directors, where the Bible is the school-book, the only school-book ; where a large Bible is selected and placed upon a stand in the middle of the school, impressing, at least leaving the impression to take effect, upon the minds of the young, that the Bible is the only book in the world, and addressing to it something almost of an idolatrous respect. In...

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